In the mid-1980s Pete Jordan got a job at Jack In The Box, a job that taught him quickly that he had no tolerance for customer service. Despite the boss constantly cramming "the customer is always right" rhetoric down his throat, he told the first one that demanded he move faster to fuck off. As a result, Pete was demoted to the position of dish washer, a position which he in turn found to be ideal. There was no customer service, and time away from the bosses watchful eyes left him plenty of opportunity to slack off. It was at this point that an epiphany struck Pete Jordan. He realized that he could perhaps fund his love of traveling by dish washing his way around the country and vowed to wash dishes in each of the fifty states of America. A dozen or so dish gigs later he began chronicling his soapy adventures in a zine entitled Dishwasher.

Dishwasher Pete did this for 10 years, 15 zines, 33 states, and a total of 88 different dish jobs. He busted suds on hippy communes, off-shore oil rigs, ski lodges, passenger trains, and alaskan canneries. In the process, he got quite a reputation that was of an almost folk-loric proportion. What Paul Bunyan was to lumberjacks in the 19th century, Pete Jordan was the same type of epic hero to dishwashers of the 1990s. He garnered so much attention for himself that he landed a spot on the David Letterman Show (which he instead sent his friend Jess Hillard pretending to be him), and as a regular on NPR's This American Life radio program.

In 2002, Dishwasher Pete hung up his dish towel, his insane quest, and moved to Amsterdam with his wife. He took up a new career as a bicycle mechanic, but not before writing a book. A few months ago Pete's story - Dishwasher, One Man's Quest to wash Dishes in all Fifty States was released on Harper Perennial Books.

He's currently on a book release tour across the US and will be appearing at Needles + Pens on Thursday, May 31st. But before he gets to SF, I wanted to ask the Dish Master a few questions. So, here you have it, a mini-interview with the legendary Dishwasher Pete:

Andrew: How long's it been since you washed some dishes?

Dishwasher Pete: Professionally, it's been almost six years. Non-professionally, yesterday at a friends house in Philadelphia. I'm always honing my chops via home dishing.

Andrew: Besides the random cigarette butt, what was the weirdest thing you found on a plate over the years?

Dishwasher Pete: There's not much weird to find in bus tubs since, unlike a dumpsterwhich may hold untold treasurebus tubs almost always just contain the dirty dishes and some leftovers. But still, finding a twenty-dollar bill was weird since the waitress swore it wasn't from a customer's payment.

Andrew: What was your favorite reoccurring Dish tub score?

Dishwasher Pete: Easy. Super rich, super thick, super fudgy chocolate cake. It's something I never bother to buy for myself. But if it was ever on the menu at any place I worked, then I always zoned in on the bus tub, digging through it in search of such delicious booty.

Andrew: For some of the Dish washing gigs you took, did you know instantly before taking the job that this would be a wretched place to work, but god what a great story it'll make? Like the off-shore Oil Rig and the Hippy commune to name a couple. Which one's were the worst?

Dishwasher Pete: Well, first of all, every dish job that I took on I worked it because I needed the money. In the cases of places like the oil rig or the hippie commune, I was just curious about what dish washing in such situations would be like. Even if I were to never write about it, I just wanted to have the experience to satisfy my own curiosity.
As far as worst places: I steered clear of places I presumed would be too depressing to work at. For example, I'm fortunate because I successfully avoided what I considered to be places I thought would be the worst work environments for me: national/regional chain restaurants where I'd have to wear some itchy, polyester company garb and would get bawled out for clocking in two minutes late after a break. There's thousands of those kinds of places and each one had massive potential to be the worst job if I'd worked there. in general, if a job sucked, rather than endure it, I always just quit.

Andrew: I loved the famous dishwasher lore that you'd touch upon. You mentioned George Orwell's dish washing stint in Paris, Malcom X's East Coast train kitchen pot scrubbing, and Little Richard's dish spot in Georgia that supposedly inspired his rocknroll hits. Are there any other famous dish masters that didn't make it into the book and you feel are worthy of rememberance?

Dishwasher Pete: Allen Ginsberg dished in Times Square when he was young. Years ago, a friend gave me Ginsberg's phone number and I called to ask him about it. His assistant said Ginsberg wasn't available that moment. So we set up a phone interview for the following week. When I called at the appointed time, the assistant tried get Ginsberg on the phone. In the background, I heard the poet yell, Interview with a dish washing magazine? I'm not doing any interview with a dish washing magazine! He died a few months later and took his recollections of his dish washing experiences with him.

Andrew: Who are some of your favorite Dishwashers from the last 100 years of history?

Andrew: It seems like the main underlying reason for your quest was basically a desire travel the country and dish washing was an easy way to stay fed and pay for your beer. Did you ever think fuck, I should've called myself Waiter Pete, Bartender Pete or basically another profession that made a little bit more money than washing dishes?

Dishwasher Pete: Well, a major reason why I did dish was because of the lack of responsibility and the anonymity that the position offered. Waiting and bartending involved way too much shuckin' and jivin' for my tastes. Not only am I unable to suck up to customers, I can't prevent my true feelings for them from being expressed (which is why, when I was 17, they took me off the front counter at Jack-in-the-Box and hid me in the back with the dishes). So I was very happy accepting lower pay for less responsibility and more anonymity.

Andrew: At the time you began Dishwasher zine, Travel zines were really common. Punk kids were zig zagging across the country and writing zines about their exploits a la Cometbus zine. It seems like a big theme of those zines back then was traveling by dumpstering food and scamming everything from greyhound bus tickets to the government by collecting food stamps and G.A.. (I guess you did have your Gizmo for making free long-distance calls on pay phones) How come you took such a proletariat blue collar approach to it all and worked your way all over?

Dishwasher Pete: When I initially envisioned producing a little self-published magazine devoted to itinerant dish washing, I didn't even know what a zine was. So it wasn't like there was a conscious decision on my part that I would do something different to all these existing traveling/dumpstering zines. I just did what came naturally and that involved trying to round up a few bucks to get by (eat some food, buy a Greyhound ticket, etc.). And actually, despite my quest, throughout those twelve years, I did my best to NOT work whenever possible. (On a related note, my all time favorite zine is the utterly brilliant Scam!)

Andrew: Another thing that amazed me about your quest is the dedication you had to this, let's face it, sort of miserable minimum wage paying job. A job in which most of the time your co-workers were red necks, gnarly ex-cons and other folks that probably wouldn't be the company you'd keep if you chose.

Dishwasher Pete: Thanks.

Andrew: I know you were a frequent guest on This American Life. Did Ira Glass approach you to be on his show or vice versa? And why did you pursue This American Life and reject the offers you got from CNN, ABC, and the indie film makers that wanted to tell your story?

Dishwasher Pete: It wasn't as if I was saying NO to everyone and then I jumped a mile high when This American Life asked me to be on the show. Actually, when a friend passed along the message and gave me told me TAL's phone number, I had never even heard of the show. After failing to make the call for a month or two, the friend said he'd call them for me. When I learned they wanted me to read the Letterman bit, I was relieved since that was already written and I wouldn't have to do any work.

Andrew: And how did you sort out getting paid from the David Letterman show after they found out a phony Dishwasher Pete appeared on their show?

Dishwasher Pete: Jess called the talent coordinator a couple weeks later asking for the money. She was very cool to him; told him she knew he was an imposter. But not long afterward, the $500 check showed upjust in time to pay Jess' rent.

Andrew: Do you think that now that you've got a book out, Letterman would have you on again or did you pretty much burn that bridge?

Dishwasher Pete: The book has been sent to them. A producer acknowledged receiving it. But I guess they still don't see the humorthey haven't called back.

Andrew: Throughout the book you mention all of the different types of Mac and Cheese boxes you collected in the states you traveled through. How many different boxes are you up to today?

Dishwasher Pete: Not sure how many boxes the collection contains since portions of the collection is spread around the country. But they're being rounded up for an installation that'll take place at Reading Frenzy (Portland OR) on the evening of June 7th.

Andrew: Do they have boxed Mac and Cheese in Holland?

Dishwasher Pete: Thankfully (for my the sake of my health), no.

Andrew: It's nice that despite the Bukowski quote you used - What woman chooses to live with a Dishwasher? that you still managed to get a woman to live with you and move across the world with you.

PS - Dishwasher, One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in all Fifty States is available at neighborhood independent bookstores nationwide. Or if you can't find it there I recommend ordering it online from these fine zine slinging establishments: Needles+Pens (duh), Reading Frenzy, or Quimbys.

PSS - Some of the images for this blog were taken from the long out-of-print Dishwasher 7" that came out on Sticker Guy Pete's 702 records many moons ago (...is that credit enough?)

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

I don't think at this point it needs to be written since the last update to Fecal Face was a long time ago, but...

I, John Trippe, have put this baby Fecal Face to bed. I'm now focusing my efforts on running ECommerce at DLX which I'm very excited about... I guess you can't take skateboarding out of a skateboarder.

It was a great 15 years, and most of that effort can still be found within the site. Click around. There's a lot of content to explore.

I'm not sure how many people are lucky enough to have The San Francisco Giants 3 World Series trophies put on display at their work for the company's employees to enjoy during their lunch break, but that's what happened the other day at Deluxe. So great.

When works of art become commodities and nothing else, when every endeavor becomes “creative” and everybody “a creative,” then art sinks back to craft and artists back to artisans—a word that, in its adjectival form, at least, is newly popular again. Artisanal pickles, artisanal poems: what’s the difference, after all? So “art” itself may disappear: art as Art, that old high thing. Which—unless, like me, you think we need a vessel for our inner life—is nothing much to mourn.

Hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional—the image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries. What if the latest model to emerge means the end of art as we have known it? --continue reading

"[Satire] is important because it brings out the flaws we all have and throws them up on the screen of another person," said Turner. “How they react sort of shows how important that really is.” Later, he added, "Charlie took a hit for everybody." -read on

NYC --- A new graffiti abatement program put forth by the police commissioner has beat cops carrying cans of spray paint to fill in and cover graffiti artists work in an effort to clean up the city --> Many cops are thinking it's a waste of resources, but we're waiting to see someone make a project of it. Maybe instructions for the cops on where to fill-in?

The NYPD is arming its cops with cans of spray paint and giving them art-class-style lessons to tackle the scourge of urban graffiti, The Post has learned.

Shootings are on the rise across the city, but the directive from Police Headquarters is to hunt down street art and cover it with black, red and white spray paint, sources said... READ ON

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

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